Leonardo Da Vinci: Artist, Thinker and Man of Science, 第 2 卷

at Florence, or even for the execution of the gates of the Baptistery at Florence, ordered just a century earlier.

Contemporary witness, however, is all unanimous as to the hostility · between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

It may be that the opinion expressed by Leonardo on the occasion of the setting up of the David gave umbrage to the sculptor. One thing is certain, the younger rival looked askance at the older man's genius. The man who had openly declared Perugino to be a dullard, who had accused Raphael of plagiarism, and pronounced the work of one of his best friends, Baccio d'Agnolo, puerile, was not disposed to bow his head before an artistic talent which, though less spontaneous, and less calculated to impress the vulgar than his own, was in reality far deeper. Vasari tells, in a very confused fashion, a story on this subject, the sense of which, unless I am mistaken, is as follows : Leo X. had consulted Leonardo as to the completion of the façade of the church of San Lorenzo at Florence. Hearing this, Michelangelo, who had been commissioned to do the work, left Florence, with the approval of the Duke, Giuliano de' Medici. Leonardo, in his turn, filled with disgust, made up his mind to travel to France. (See vol. i., p. 156, the story of Michelangelo's impertinent attack on Leonardo.)

Before we actually study Leonardo's composition, let us try to follow up the history of the masterpiece, its vicissitudes, and its destruction, so greatly to be deplored.

This time, contrary to his usual habit, Leonardo proved that he could be punctual.

At the appointed time, in February, 1505, he had his scaffoldings erected, not in the Pope's Chamber in Santa Maria, but in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. 1

There are fresh entries of purchases of plaster, “ gesso da murare,” (destined, this time, for covering the wall,) and linseed oil; then of Greek pitch, ceruse, gold leaf, Venetian sponges (663 lbs. of plaster, 89 lbs. of Greek pitch, 223 lbs. of linseed oil), etc. At the same moment the auxiliaries, artists or craftsmen (the painter Raffaello d'Antonio di Biagio, who worked for a fortnight on the picture, Ferrando Spagnolo, another painter, Lorenzo di Marco, Leonardo's “garzone,” Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, who ground the colours),

rise up round the master. Everything promised to go smoothly. In August, 1505, there is a purchase of fifty-four “braccia” of canvas to cover the scaffolding, probably for the protection of the artists, then of nut-oil and ceruse and plaster, and last of all, wax to smear over the linen stretched in the window frames instead of glass. All at once the payments cease, although the work is still unfinished. What had caused so serious a check ?

For some time already, Leonardo, with the characteristic weakness which so often hampered his work, had been allowing the chemist to get the better of the artist. He had read in Pliny, without thoroughly understanding it, a recipe for some special stucco used by the Roman painters. He had tried it for the first time for his painting in the Pope's Chamber, where he was then working. Having placed his picture against the wall, he lighted a large charcoal fire in front of it, the heat of which dried and hardened the substance on which he had worked. He endeavoured to employ the same preparation in the Council Hall itself, and as a matter of fact, the lower part, which the fire could reach, did dry and harden satisfactorily. But in the upper region, which the heat could not touch on account of the distance, the substance remained soft and ran.1

This was more than enough to put Leonardo out of heart, and, as in the case of the Adoration of the Magi, the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, and many another work, he left his masterpiece alone, and began to build fresh castles in the air.

At this moment he seems to have turned his eyes in more directions than one. Appearances all point to his having made a journey to Rome in 1505. In 1506 he went back to Milan, summoned thither, as early as the month of May, by Charles d'Amboise, who governed the duchy in the name of King Louis XII. Neither threats nor

1 Vasari only tells us that he desired to paint in oils on the wall, but that he used so thick a substance, “per lo incollato del muro," that in a short time the colour began to run. Paolo Giovio, who edited, in 1527 or 1528, the dialogues published by Tiraboschi (Storia della Letteratura italiana, Milan edition, vol. vii., p. 2495), also says that Leonardo used oil (nut), “Manet etiam in Comitio Curiae Florentinae pugna atquc victoria de Pisanis praeclare ad modum, sed infeliciter inchoata, vitio tectorii colores juglandino oleo intritos singulari contumacia respuentis. Cujus inexpectatae (injuriae) justissimus dolor interrupto operi gratiae plurimum addidisse videtur.”

entreaties could induce him to alter his resolve. The Gonfaloniere, Piero Soderini, used very harsh language concerning him. The artist, he wrote, had not behaved as he should have done towards the Florentine Republic; he had accepted a considerable sum of money, and had only made a small beginning on a very large piece of work. But Leonardo was a proud-hearted man. Every one of his actions bore witness to his generosity. (There is a story that when he went to the bank to draw the monthly sum given him by Soderini, the cashier offered him the money in bags filled with “quattrini” (farthings), but

the artist refused to take them. “I am no farthing painter,” he said.) Hearing of Soderini's complaints, he got together, with his friends assistance, the whole sum he had received, and brought it back to him. Soderini, however, refused to accept it. Thus the painter saved his honour as a man. But how are we to excuse the artist's treason to his art ; his desertion from the battlefield, his abandonment of his imperfect work to all the chances fate might bring ?

Let us say at once that the sketch on the MS. 2037.)

walls of the Palazzo Vecchio was destined shortly to disappear. On April 13, 1513, the Council of the Florentine Republic gave orders to a carpenter to put up a balustrade to protect the figures painted by Leonardo in the great hall. Then there is silence as to the masterpiece, and no one knows how or when it perished.1

As Leonardo's cartoon was hardly more long-lived than his sketch, we are forced to be content with a few more or less fragmentary

STUDY FOR ONE OF THE HORSEMEN IN THE “BATTLE OF ANGHIARI." (Library of the Institut de France,

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copies. At these a rapid glance must be taken, so that by means of their scattered fragments we may endeavour to reconstitute the original composition.

Lorenzo Zacchia of Lucca was the first to reproduce the group of four men on horseback, in an engraving, inscribed “ Opus sumptum ex tabella Leonardi Vincii propria manu picta, a Laurentio Zacchia Lucensi ab eodem nunc excusum” (1558).

An unfinished picture preserved in the magazine of the Uffizi Gallery, which, though certainly never touched by Leonardo's hand, was spoken of as early as 1635 as being his work, would seem to have formed the basis of Zacchia's engraving. After this, in chronological order, come the

SKETCH FOR THE "BATTLE OF Anghiari." Rubens drawing acquired for the Louvre, and Edelinck's engraving, of which I shall speak presently.2 A drawing representing three horsemen and three foot-soldiers existed during the eighteenth century in the Rucellai Palace at Florence ; this drawing has been engraved several times, notably in the Etruria pittrice, vol. i. p. 29.

Some forty years since, a lithograph 4 appeared, said to be “a facsimile of a drawing by Leonardo, in the collection of M. Bergeret, the historical painter.” But Bergeret's reputation as an imitator is too well established to need further mention here, and his so-called drawing by Leonardo can only deserve notice in so far as
it is connected with more serious documents. According to M. Georges Duplessis, the learned Keeper of the Prints in the Louvre, the lithograph in question is a reproduction of an inferior picture which M. Duplessis saw in the London National Gallery in 1862. More recently, the much regretted Charles Timbal purchased an old painting representing the celebrated group of men on horseback, differing in some striking points from the Rubens drawing. This picture, which has been engraved by M. Haussoullier, adds some valuable details to those we have in the said drawing. In the first place, the types agree with those of Leonardo. In the second, it enables us to identify several of the studies in the Pesth Museum, to which we shall refer presently.

(Accademia, Venice.)

1 Vasari, Milanesi's edition, vol. iv., p. 42.

2 Robert Dumesnil, Le Peintre-Graveur français, vol. vii., no. 44, p. 203. The earliest editor of the Trattato, Du Fresne, mentions a picture owned in his time by Le Maire, an excellent painter of perspective, which was believed to have been the original of Edelinck's engraving. (Mariette's Abecedario, vol. iii. p. 166.)

4 Dr. Rigollot has already described this lithograph as an imposture, Catalogue de l'Euvre de Léonard da Vinci, p. 64.

These indispensable preliminaries over, let us study Leonardo's work, as far as written documents and pictorial evidence enable us to reconstruct it.

A battle may be represented in two ways. The first necessitates looking at it from the strategic, the anecdotic, or the picturesque point of view (the tapestries representing the History of the Conquest of Tunis, the Destruction of the Armada; Vasari's paintings in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, of the battles fought and cities taken by Cosimo de' Medici). In this case all the undulations of the ground, the positions occupied by the various bodies of troops, and the numberless incidents of the fray, are made to appear. The second method--that of Raphael, of Salvator Rosa, of Le Brun, and Gros, and Meissonier-consists in sacrificing all unimportant details, and concentrating attention on a very few characteristic episodes, sometimes even on a single one. In this case, the selected subject generally implies honour ascribed to the general in command, who appears in the character of “deus ex machinâ ” to decide the struggle. This plan, the only one worthy of a historical painter, allows the artist to substitute a small number of actors—who in their own persons sum up all the heat of warlike passion or the joy of triumph-for large impersonal masses.

Leonardo had but few models to guide him, and all were of too archaic a character to be of any real service. The first of these in chronological sequence were the battlepieces of Paolo Ucello, with their amusing and often comic details ; armour-laden knights